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Plain packaging for cigarettes is smoke and mirrors: DiManno

It may seem counter-intuitive for the Liberals to declare they’ll legalize recreational pot whilst simultaneously continuing to hammer smokers, but if you’re looking for logic from government, you’re looking in the wrong place, writes Rosie DiManno.

Minister of Health Jane Philpott has officially launched public consultations on plain packaging requirements for tobacco products. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

So it bothers me, an unrepentant and deliriously avid smoker, not a smidge that Ottawa will likely force cigarette manufacturers to use plain packaging for fags and other tobacco products. That three-month consultation period which has been announced is smoke-and-mirrors, window-dressing for the pretense of hearing out the dissenting groups — and basically there’s just one of those, Big Tobacco. Well, civil libertarians too, I suppose, except doubtless nico-Nazis lurk within that constituency as well.

It may seem counter-intuitive for the Liberals to declare they’ll legalize recreational pot whilst simultaneously continuing to hammer smokers, but if you’re looking for logic from government you are an idiot.

They don’t want you to die. But they will let a physician help kill you.

I no more want young people to take up smoking than the most stiff-necked anti-tobacco activists. Ergo, go ahead, blank out the DuMaurier red, Camel yellow and Player’s blue. None of the packaging is particularly sexy or alluring, though the director-general of WHO seems to believe there’s “gloss” and “glamour” attached to the casing, which since 2012 in Canada, via edict, have been 75 per cent devoted to lurid health-porn imagery and warnings.

The bossy-boots are in a particular ban-the-butt mood over “skinny’’ smokes allegedly targeted at women and girls. What, no transgender? Personally I wouldn’t be caught dead with a slimmy.

Tobacco manufacturers might very well have a strong legal case if government prevents them from trademarking their products. Except this country has a decidedly activist Supreme Court, should the fight go that far.

Just don’t buy the bogus claim that plain packaging accounts for the significant reduction of smoking in Australia — first country to introduce such legislation, only country thus far to fully implement the plain packaging rules, and roundly cited by the anti-tobacco evangelists.

The smoking habit is declining, for a whole bunch of reasons. I’d say cost is the most significant factor, because who wants to spend five grand a year for a pack-a-day? Well, yeah, some of us. And of course just about everybody is gaga health conscious these days, under the apparent delusion that they can live forever if they jog far enough or delete red meat from their diet or de-tox faithfully or, as that maven of modern living, Gwyneth Paltrow, has recommended, steam clean their uteri.

I direct your attention to one of the few agnostic studies on the Australian initiative, a study by a pair of economics professors at RMIT University in Melbourne. Their preliminary evidence has shown no empirical support for the alleged health benefits — a drop in tobacco consumption — that can be attributed to plain packaging.

Authors Sinclair Davidson and Ashton de Silva crunched tons of data, leaning heavily on national statistics for household expenditures on tobacco products.

“Despite our economic efforts, the data refused to yield any indication this policy has been successful; there is no empirical evidence to support the notion that the plain packaging has resulted in lower household expenditure on tobacco than there otherwise would have been. There is some faint evidence to suggest … household expenditure on tobacco increased.”

I’ll spare you the eye-glazing details. But, in conclusion: “Establishing the efficacy of the plain packaging policy will take painstaking econometric analysis over a long period of time. This will involve having to untangle the effects of excise increases and changes in smoker behaviour, and substitution to illegal tobacco products. As things stand at the minute, it would be a very brave public-health advocate that claims vindication from one data point … in supporting the plain packaging policy.”

Nothing here but false advertising about the purported benefits of no advertising; not the merest mention of a brand, which basically is all that distinguishes one cigarette product from another.

It’s phony baloney behavioural engineering, merely inconveniencing those who buy cigarettes, as store clerks will now be faced with shelves of indistinguishable packs, eenie-meenie-miney-mo.

Bullying is OK, you see, when government and health jackboots do it.

Data shmata.

Or, as the aforementioned Australian researchers dryly observed, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.”

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